By Richard Cowan and David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax-cut and spending bill faced further delay on Friday, after a nonpartisan referee on Senate rules rejected more provisions and Republicans struggled to find consensus on proposed healthcare cuts.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who had hoped to begin voting on Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” as early as Friday, faced new roadblocks as his 53-member majority seeks to use a parliamentary maneuver to bypass unified Democratic opposition to the legislation.
Republicans now have only a week to get the legislation through the Senate and House of Representatives and onto Trump’s desk by the July 4 Independence Day holiday.
The bill, widely viewed as the signature legislation of Trump’s second presidential term, would extend his 2017 tax cuts and fund tighter border security and his crackdown on immigration, while also boosting military spending.
Thune’s task was further complicated this week when the Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, informed Republicans in her capacity as the referee of the chamber that more than $250 billion in healthcare cuts in the Republican bill did not qualify for inclusion under long-standing budget rules.
Senate Democrats said late on Thursday she had blocked several more provisions that would deregulate gun silencers and easily concealable weapons, provide a tax carve-out for religious colleges and impose tighter certification requirements for a tax benefit aimed at low-income families.
An earlier version of the bill passed by the House last month was forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to add about $3 trillion to the federal government’s $36.2 trillion debt.
Trump expressed “hope” on Thursday that the bill would pass before July 4. He planned to stay in Washington over the weekend — rather than traveling to one of his resorts, which is his usual practice — meaning he will be available to play an arm-twisting role in the negotiations.
Lawmakers will face a far more serious deadline later this summer, when they need to raise the nation’s self-imposed debt ceiling or risk a devastating default.
Once the bill passes the Senate, it will need to return to the House for another vote before Trump can sign it into law.
REPUBLICAN DIVISIONS
The lengthy talks have laid bare divisions within Trump’s Republican Party and the difficulties of passing such massive legislation with thin margins of control. Three Republican “no” votes in either chamber would be enough to scuttle the bill.
Senate Republicans have been arguing for weeks over one provision in particular: a Medicaid cut that several senators feared could put rural hospitals in tough financial straits or even out of business.
Behind closed doors, Republicans were trying to figure out a way to possibly tweak their language to make the savings conform to Senate rules.
Democrats kept hammering away at a bill that they say cuts social safety net programs that also include food aid for the poor in order to pay for tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy.
Besides healthcare disagreements, talks continued with House Republican counterparts on SALT, a cap on deductions to state and local taxes that was imposed in Trump’s 2017 tax-cut law. It has angered lawmakers mainly in coastal states where home prices and property taxes are higher than most other parts of the country.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and David MorganEditing by Scott Malone, Diane Craft and Frances Kerry)
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